Officials in the government using private emails without even understanding the consequences has become a common practice.

A few years back former Information Technology Minister had sent out an email using his gmail account which had led to a major hue and cry being raised. The latest on the list of private email users is Hillary Clinton.

A major fake currency racket was busted by the West Bengal special task force. During an extensive raid conducted the police found that fake Indian currency was being printed and distributed in the Manicktala and Domjur areas.

While the exact value of the fake currency is being ascertained, preliminary investigations would show that the fake currency seized could be valued at several crores of rupees. However the more ironic aspect of this raid was that the police seized fake currency of Turkey and Zimbabwe also.

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Did Mukesh Singh just make the case against him stronger. The Supreme Court has stayed his death penalty in connection with the Nirbhaya rape and murder case.

Singh who was awarded a death penalty had moved the Supreme Court which had stayed the sentence. The Supreme Court while hearing cases in which capital punishment takes a key aspect into account-” is the accused beyond reformation and is there any remorse.”

The last couple of weeks have witnessed an extremely high profile trial at a court in Brooklyn in which various documents regarding the life of Osama Bin Laden just before he had died were released.

A careful examination of almost all those documents would suggest that some aspects regarding the days Osama Bin Laden spent in Pakistan have not come out in the open completely.

The Abottabad Commission report probing the circumstances leading to the death of Laden and also a very telling investigation by New York Times reporter Carlotta Gall, author of the book The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan clearly suggest that the ISI in Pakistan knew everything about Bin Laden and his whereabouts.

The Afzal Guru issue does not seem to die down. One of the main reasons why his execution was delayed is because the government had felt that this may lead to problems in Jammu and Kashmir.

It is almost two years now since Afzal Guru was hanged to death at the Tihar jail, but in some way or the other the issue seems to crop up. The latest being a demand made by some leaders in the Valley who have asked for his mortal remains to be returned.

We have seen a surge in the recruitment of women into the ISIS in the past couple of days. Teenagers from Britain have gone missing which has led to a major outcry and India too had a close shave when two girls who accompanied four youth from Hyderabad tried to join the dreaded outfit.
This brings us to the focus of the Al-Zawra, the exclusive women’s wing of the ISIS which is also known as the finishing school for lady jihadis.

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National Parties collected Rs 1158 crore funds for the elections that were held in 2014.
An analysis which was conducted by the National Election Watch and the Association for Democratic Reforms took into account the declarations made by the national parties to the Election Commission of India.

Funds collected by National Parties during the Lok Sabha elections
The National parties considered for the report are BJP, INC, BSP, NCP, CPI, and CPM. Total funds collected by the National Parties, in cash, cheque/DD or in kind, during Lok Sabha elections held in 2004 was Rs 223.80 crores while during Lok Sabha 2009 elections increased by 282%, to Rs 854.89 crores.

A book titled Gideon’s Spies- The Secret History of the Mossad has revealed that terror groups such as the ISIS are using encrypted messages on eBay, Reddit, and pornographic websites. This technology where secret information is concealed within a digital file and this can be accessed by the other person who is supposed to read the message.

This technology which the ISIS has been using is known as steganography. It is through this technology that secret messages are concealed and investigations have found that several messages which were encrypted had information about future attacks.

The Mossad had learnt that there was an increase in the flow of internet traffic following the Charlie Hebdo attack. This was made use of by terrorist groups who used steganography to post encrypted messages on the internet. The Mossad decoded hexadecimal characters and prime numbers which the terrorists were using to conceal the information.

The al Qaeda wanted to stage a 26/11 styled attack in Europe and the nod of the Osma Bin Laden was sought for the same. This was a revelation made at the Brooklyn Federal court which is trying Abid Naseer, a 28-year-old Pakistani who is accused of plotting to launch an attack on the New York subway system.

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India has already said that it expects nothing dramatic from the visit of Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar’s visit to Pakistan. He is scheduled to visit Pakistan on Tuesday, March 3, as part of an initiative to reach out to the SAARC nations.

The visit to Pakistan comes seven months after India called off foreign secretary level talks with Pakistan. Both countries would hope that the talks are back on the table and India feels that Pakistan must extend more confident building measures in this regard.